Award Data

Thick, 3D woven carbon/phenolic composites offer potential improvement over legacy thermal protection systems (TPS) for re-entry vehicle heat shield applications. However due to the scale and complexity of typical re-entry vehicle structures, it is likely that multiple 3D woven panels would need to laid up to create the overall heat shield, creating a potential weak spots at the panel joints. ...

We propose to form a network and a set of tools that will create a shared situation awareness with Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Ground Control Stations (GCSs) and airline dispatchers at Airline Operations Centers (AOCs). Our solution is motivated by the Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) community in commercial aviation, where the CDMnet was created back in 1997 to facilitate collaboration be ...

Numerical simulations of chemical kinetics are a critical component of aerospace research, Earth systems research, and energy research. These simulations enable a better understanding of the evolution of chemical species over time in domains as diverse as climate and weather prediction, combustion simulation, and air quality prediction. The time-to-solution in these simulations can be improved by ...

Aether Industries proposes the development of a novel, primary plasma propulsion system that is well suited for small spacecraft. This technology, called the CubeSat Ambipolar Thruster (CAT), would provide CubeSats and other micro- and nano-satellites with the propulsive capability to make meaningful orbital plane and altitude changes — capability that does not currently exist with state-of-t ...

Lithium-Ion batteries have been a main source of energy for many aerospace applications over the past decade. Future space missions are facing a number of challenging requirements, including significant increase in specific energy, approaching 500 Wh/kg, and energy density of 700 Wh/l at cell level. Compared to state-of-the-art technology today, a reduction in mass and volume are necessary, along ...

The proposed work investigates an approach that would allow an annular ion engine geometry to achieve ion beam currents approaching the Child-Langmuir limit. In this respect, the annular engine, whose design inherently allows for significant increases in perveance by resolving the span-to-gap problem, can achieve the projected high current densities necessary for high thrust, high power applicati ...

TBD

The "piston errors" and aberrations of the mirror segments used in large telescopes, are typically measured with on-board optical instruments, usually a dispersed Hartman sensor (DHS) and/or dispersed fringe sensor (DFS). Calibrating and testing of the wavefront sensors are typically performed using custom-built fused silica phase plate arrays. The manufacture and assembly of each custom phase pla ...

Acute challenges are faced by the designers of fluid transport systems for spacecraft because of the persistently unfamiliar and unforgiving low-g environment. However, with modern design tools capillarity can used to passively perform critical life support functions, increasing reliability, while enabling new device functionality. Such systems are directly tied to critical life support systems: i ...

A Microchannel Sabatier Reactor System (MSRS) consisting of cross connected arrays of isothermal or graded temperature reactors is proposed. The reactor array enables nearly complete single pass carbon dioxide reduction using the Sabatier reaction, allowing efficient recovery of oxygen from in situ carbon dioxide resources on Mars or other Near Earth Objects. Arrays of microchannel reactors with ...